The number of people deported or threatened with deportation from Britain has been rising exponentially in recent months. Some of them have lived in Britain, worked, brought up families, and paid taxes for fifty years. Here is a recent example: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/dec/01/man-detained-threatened-with-removal-after-52-years-in-the-uk; but there are many more. I never thought I’d live to see this, in a country that has boasted of its generosity to visitors for centuries, and prided itself on its charitable flexibility when it comes to bureaucracy: i.e., not necessarily sticking to ’the rules’ if those rules occasioned clear injustices.

I suspect it dates from Theresa May’s autocratic tenure of the Home Office, and her anxiety to appease the Tory Right and Ukip by getting the numbers of immigrants down; or, at least – because the expulsion of a handful of fifty-year residents can’t possibly make a significant dent in the total – demonstrating to those monsters that she is ‘tough’. Theresa May is not a nice woman; nor, I would have thought, a truly ‘Christian’ one. I sometimes wonder about her vicar father. Has anyone researched his career and theology?

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My apologies to the readers – mainly men, I have to say – who were upset by and critical of my decision to withdraw my posts on ‘sexual harassment’. No, it doesn’t mean I’ve changed my views. Or that I’m afraid of being ‘outed’ as a harasser myself. Yes, it did have something to do with the criticism I was getting from women (not Kajsa) who, I maintain, had grossly misread me, and some of whom were close to me – and hopefully still are, despite all this. As one of my (male) defenders wrote, ‘The posts themselves I thought very sensible but the whole subject is very charged at the moment.’ You can say that again. I withered under the scorn. I’m clearly not as brave as I thought I was.

‘Men are from Mars, women from Venus.’ Whoever invented that silly aphorism obviously didn’t know as much about the planets as we do now: Mars dry, cold and sterile, Venus a burning mass of volcanic lava. That figures.